The revolution has not yet come to Milad Zari's bakery. Cairo is raging in protest. Tanks rumble past buildings aflame. But down an alley, just beyond the city of the dead, where the poor live scattered amid forgotten graves, Zari bakes bread. He works from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., earning less than $90 a month to pay the rent and raise six children. It has been this way for 20 years, his hands, quick as sparrows, feeding flat dough into an oven. "How can I go into the street and protest?"

Is it well done or half-baked? The latest thing to come out of Los Angeles' landmark Van de Kamp's bakery isn't to everyone's taste. The Los Angeles Community College District has completed a $72-million renovation of the Glassell Park home of the now-defunct Dutch-themed bakery that was known for its windmill-shaped cookies and Danish pastries. But budgetary problems have prevented district officials from opening a college satellite campus at the 4-acre site near Fletcher Drive and San Fernando Road as they had planned.

"Have you been to Porto's yet?" Cuban-born actor Andy Garcia remembers friends asking when he'd just moved to L.A. in 1978. For transplanted Cubans in those days, the small family-run bakery's flaky guava-cheese pastries, papa rellenas and other Cuban specialties were as close to a taste of their homeland as they could get.

ALEPPO, Syria - The bags of pita bread are stacked in tight formation on the sidewalk, as if standing at attention. From here they will be dispersed across the rebel-held neighborhood to small, nondescript distribution centers: the bike repair shop down the street, the corner convenience store or the electrician's shop. The long lines that used to form outside bakeries, tempting targets for government air attacks, are gone. "We created the center for the protection of the people," said Abu Muhammad, a member of the bakery committee for the Bustan Qasir and Kalaseh neighborhoods.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Raza Gul trudges the half-mile to work through a maze of brick and mud homes, sewage streams and toddlers running naked. She's two months pregnant, and her lower back aches as she steps over ditches and eyes speeding cars. Her sister-in-law, a frail woman, shadows her. They say little. The slight wind chills Gul and she thinks about the cost of wood to heat her home and keep her four children warm. She is certain that her husband is already prowling their neighborhood hillside, hunting his first hit of opium for the day. She knows he'll walk to one of the local dealers, then sit alone in their crumbling house, roll his stash in foil and smoke.

Along with the tagliatelle, pizza and fettuccine alfredo, customers at the famous Sarno's Caffe Dell'Opera Wednesday helped themselves to large servings of tears, hugs and "I remember when" stories about owner Alberto Sarno, who was gunned down in his front yard Tuesday morning. Old Italian men from the neighborhood, lunching businessmen and music lovers stepped into the dimly lit restaurant to give condolences and reflect on the life of one of the city's best-known opera promoters.

The quintessential Paris experience is to enter a boulangerie , inhale the heavenly smell of fresh bread and buy a baguette for an impromptu picnic on the Seine. Now imagine stuffing a euro into a vending machine that dispenses warm baguettes with all the cachet of an ATM machine. Talk about a buzz kill. French baker Jean-Louis Hecht calls his new baguette vending machine the "bakery of tomorrow," according to this Associated Press story. He has installed two vending machines so far -- one in Paris, one in a northeastern town called Hombourg-Haut -- that spit out hot bread for a Euro (about $1.42)

Dave's Killer Bread : Portland, Oregon knows it and loves it. The hearty, organic bread was first launched at a Portland farmers market in 2005. The public response was swift and overwhelmingly positive. Since then the company has grown from 30 employees to 250 employees, with sales increasing from $3 million to $50 million. Now, the bread, which comes in more than a dozen varieties, including the Good Seed, Blues Bread and Rockin' Rye, is available in Los Angeles at most Vons and Pavilions locations.